With the advent of the attention economy, live-streaming has entered into fields including sports, entertainment, education and even social networking. Moreover, it is closely linked with consumer behavior, forming many 'live +' modes that use live-streaming to drive original business development. As the most common consumption behavior in live-streaming and the most important pillar of income of the live-streaming industry, studying the influencing factors of gift-giving behavior can not only supplement the use and gratification theory in new media environment, but also serve as the guidance for the development of the live-streaming industry.
According to self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000), the satisfaction of basic psychological needs, including autonomy needs, competence needs and relatedness needs, can stimulate people's behaviors, such as study and fitness, etc. Meanwhile, defined by the characteristics of synchronous, participation, bidirectional coexistence and decentralization, live-streaming enables the possibility of multiple forms of interaction. Based on the existing theoretical and empirical studies, this study intends to explore the impact of online basic psychological needs on online gift-giving behavior, and introduces interaction as a moderator variable. This study explored two research questions: Whether basic psychological needs will affect gift-giving behavior? Whether interaction will affect the relationship as a moderator factor?
In this study, basic psychological needs were assessed using Xi’s (2011) “Online Communication Questionnaire of College Students”, which comprises 30 items for assessing competence, autonomy and relatedness needs. Gift-giving behaviors were divided into basic gift-giving behaviors and cost gift-giving behaviors according to the monetary cost. Interaction included interpersonal interaction within streamers and viewers, and human-computer interaction between the viewers and the live-streaming platform. 400 valid questionnaires are answered by viewers of the top 10 streamers in 7 domestic live-streaming platforms. The collected data were analyzed by SPSS.
Through the verification of hypothesis, this study came to the conclusion that basic psychological needs are the factors that influence the gift-giving, especially cost gift-giving in live-streaming, while interpersonal interaction has a significant positive moderating effect. Finally, this study established a structural equation model and a moderation diagram toward basic psychological needs, gift-giving and interaction. This study confirms that basic psychological needs still play a stimulating role in the field of online consuming and provides a psychological motivation explanation for online consumption behavior from a quantitative perspective. Subsequent studies can continue to distinguish the types and characteristics of different live-streaming and live-streaming platforms in order to add other moderating variables to improve the depth of the research.
Key words: live streaming; basic gift-giving; gift-giving; online interpersonal interaction; human-computer interaction; basic psychological need